Next

Working in the high-tech sector in the Bay Area of California, especially during the past few years, has been quite a roller-coaster. Many of us challenge ourselves at work and work at the ultimate challenge of raising a family in today's world.

Virtually every one of my friends has gone through a significant job change in the past few years - layoffs, new opportunities, lost opportunities.  There seems to be a chronic effort to keep an eye out for the next gig.  Those of us in this market want to keep working at it and of course we have a financial responsbility to our families as well.

As we all know there is no shortage of technology problems to solve. Have I mentioned Creative Labs Soundblaster Wireless recently?

But seriously, the good news is that the market seems to be settling down. Broadband is getting into many more homes, people are actually using phones for data services, more and more music collections are going digital, and home wireless networks are not the fringe hobby project they were just a few years ago. This keeps us Digital Dads pretty busy.

And for me, personally, its now time for my job change (ironically, the day I had lunch with a friend to tell him the good news, he was on his first day of being laid off from his former company). After a few years at one gig I am on to the next. There's even a press release about it! Somewhere.

I'll start in April and by then I can provide more details, but here are two facts - 1) it's an opportunity to make a historic impact in the mobile phone market, and 2) it's out of state. That last part is a biggie, as it means uprooting the family of five (plus dog), selling a house, buying a house, switching schools, etc.

More good news is that my oldest child is in Kindergarten (thus the transition socially will be easier) and that selling a house in the Bay Area is a pretty hot thing to do right now.

With a couple of weeks off I am re-caulking, re-painting, re-wiring, re-mulching, sorting out the buy and sell side of the transactions (browsing realtor.com) and at the same time looking forward to a great new adventure.

I'll be up there M-F until mid-June when my son finishes Kindergarten and the whole family joins me, so job #1 was to work up a solid video conferencing system to use during the week. I bought an iSight for my G4 here in the kitchen and have a decent Logitech cam on my PC that I'll use in temp housing up there. The iSight has great video and audio quality, but it ain't cheap. Worse yet, Apple tries to sell you a $30 "adapter kit" so you can clip the camera onto your G4. Apparently the iSight does not come with a G4 mount - only for G5s and Powerbooks! However, it turns out you can add some double sided tape to the PowerBook mount and works on the G4 just fine - save your $30.

The other twist is that iChat for the Mac only works with . . . iChat, and AOL Instant Messenger. We're an MSN Messenger family but Messenger for the Mac does not support video conferencing. Therefore I set up some screen names for the kitchen G4 and my PC that will go up north with me. Works like a charm!

The whole-house audio project is on hold, obviously, but other things I will consider for the new house is some level of x-10 home automation control and whole-house video as well. I suspect I'll be having a few more "long term road tests" to report in a while.

And I need to find some boxes.